Posts tagged ‘Richard’

Oh lawd. Tonight’s Sunday service sucked a big dick.
I know it’s all Labor Day and all, but really, people: howzabout you stay home and do some grilling and shit?

It was already a bad start when there were people waiting outside (and some even peering in) before we were open. I hate that. Don’t you people have better things to do than to dine at 3:30pm like a bunch of geriatrics?
And then the initial rush ended, but it was only the calm before the storm that was official dinner hour that didn’t let up until midnight. Holy crap. I didn’t even know the kitchen was supposed to be closed until Ruth mentioned making Richard (our goofy-lovable apprentice and goodnatured Sunday dishwasher) dinner and then I looked at a ticket and it was 11:58pm. What the….

As bad as it was for me for a while, Ruth had it way worse. She was getting killed and I couldn’t really help her. It was mostly pastas and sweetbreads that were bogging her down. I felt so bad every time I had to tell her to fire multiple pastas at a time. That’s the stuff that chips away at your morale: that feeling of “Didn’t I already do that” coupled with the overwhelming inner wail of “Why isn’t this over yet?” I’m pretty sure those who have paid attention have heard me singing on multiple occasions “Make it stop, make it stop, make it stop, make it stop now!”

On my side, I had multiple focaccia pickups that always had salmon dishes in between tickets so that it was always one or the other. Salmon is such a quick pickup that I can’t just make two focaccia and have it be all hunkydory. I have just enough time to roll a focaccia and throw it in the oven, slap a fish on the plancha, peek at the focaccia, turn it, flip the fish, wait a couple seconds and take it off the heat and brush it with a glaze, before I pull out the focaccia to cut in half. And then I plate the fish and finish the focaccia. It’s a pain. On top of which there are other little, easy-pickup dishes on my station. But they require me to stop what I’m doing to do them.
I’m gonna stop complaining. I didn’t have it as bad as Ruth did. By the time service was “winding down” (it never really did), she was unabashedly (and almost comically) bitter, especially about pasta. Trying to plate some cheese in the middle of fish, pasta, and ribeye pickups must’ve been hell….

I opened today. It was TOO. FREAKING. LONG.
I worked just about 13 hours I think. What the–?! But I think I managed to cover a lot of prep so that tomorrow wouldn’t be so bad… I hope. Fingers crossed.

I probably would’ve gotten out even later if not for the Knucklehead Brothers (and I mean this affectionately), Richard and Theo. I’ve actually become quite fond of them. Richard is eager to learn and always asks questions, and Theo’s going to be our intern in about a week, so he has no choice but to learn. They helped me out a good deal, and hopefully I gave them good advice and guidance about prepping. Richard rolled pasta today on his own (yay!) and I gave Theo a little tutorial about focaccia doughmaking. Let’s see how much information they’ve retained the next time I ask them to do these tasks….

I got home about an hour ago. I work tomorrow. So it’s off to shower and (hopefully) bed.

I leave you with this picture of what happens when you let me straighten up the walk-in. I just might color coordinate. Haha!
From left to right, we have: piquillo sauce, grapefruit segments, sliced orange on top of sliced persimmons, pickled onions, pistachio puree, eggplant-tahini puree, sunchoke puree, and lemon mascarpone. Mwahaha!

I have to make this short because I’m sick and I have to sleep, like NOW, but I just wanted to write a quick post about work.

I’ve been nursing a weird, mutated monster head cold since Thursday and today I wanted to call in and see if KO could cover my shift, y’know, since I covered his when he was sick. But apparently he had family in town and it was a no-go. I pretty much sucked it up and went to work, despite my feeling like crap.
This is one of the rare instances when I feel like I hate my job, when I’m nothing more than a skilled laborer, with seemingly no benefits of any kind. How sucky is that? Maybe a lesser (or smarter?) person would’ve just called in, but like I said, I just had some head cold. If I had the flu, I definitely would’ve called in. But in this instance, I had some weird sense of responsibility to my coworkers since I couldn’t find myself a replacement.

Needless to say, I came into work feeling quite down. And I couldn’t even ask Ruth (who was opening) to work a double because she was getting sick too. Goddamn it!!!!!!! Everything was pissing me off because I just wanted to go home. (I stayed professional and just kept it in. I ain’t no whiny-ass brat.)

I should be grateful for some things, though:
– I was on station 1. If I’d had to work station 3 sick (which I’ve done before), I’d probably would’ve had a little inner breakdown.
– No one ordered chicken until 10pm or so. Because dealing with chicken during dinner rush is an effing bitch.
– Elliot and Armanzo would ask me how I was doing, which to some degree means they care about me.

Okay, okay, they probably do care about me, or else they wouldn’t have sent me home around 12:30am when things definitely died down and stage Theo (yep, he was back… as well as stage Richard, but I didn’t deal with him much) said he could handle the rest. Thank you guys! You are great. Even though I had to work for 8 hours with a leaky nose and sneezing like a fiend, but hey, I’ll take what I can get. They told me to take a cab (which I did) and now, a hot bath and two head cold tablets later, I’m heading off to bed.

Because I have to work tomorrow. And I don’t want to be sicker than I already am.